Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Tween's Bedroom Makeover or How to HGTV a Room

For the last couple of years, we (our family) have been saying its time to re-do Tessa's bedroom. Now it wasn't her that initially brought this up. Not liking change, she was happy to keep on living in Pooh's Corner forever. You see, her daddy had done the nursery when I was in my third trimester, 12 years ago, especially for her and Tessa always loved her room

That said, it was really time to change over that room. Over the year's Pooh's corner had definitely seen better days and was beginning to look like a candidate for urban renewal! Still -- I wasn't looking forward to doing all that work on my summer vacation. That's when I got the very bright idea to have Tessa do most of the work. It was her room - let her do the make-over and take real ownership of it.

So the two of us got to planning. She came up with color schemes and I showed her how to use those colors to their best advantage. We involved my woodworking husband Paul to, once again, make another bed for Tessa (this is the third time he's done that!). Tessa spent 3 weeks cleaning out a lifetime of treasures from room which will be donated or garage saled out. Then she started painting, and painting, and painting. It seemed like it took foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!! But she persevered. I don't think I've ever seen her focus so much on a project.

When she was done, she picked out the vinyl decals from a great online source Walls Need Love and we talked about the placement. Tessa really made all the design decisions with me only giving a little whisper here and there. Most of the accessories came from Walmart.com since the dorm sales were going on.

All in all it took about 8 weeks to complete with a 12 year old doing the vast majority of the work - she did the designing, painted the room (including floors), refinished and painted the furniture and then did the finally decorating. With the project easily coming under $400 total (including the bed which used a lot of reclaimed wood), it was definitely designing on a dime!